Cedexis Expands Cloud Availability Visibility

The visibility that Cedexis Radar provides is granular such that users can see how performance varies based on the specific data center that a cloud service is being deployed from. All cloud and CDN vendors have multiple points of presence in order to serve content closer to consumers and to provide additional redundancy and availability.
For example, Kagan noted that if a service is deployed in Amazon's Virginia-based data center, that might work well for U.S.-based end users, but the Cedexis Radar service can show what the impact would be if the service was shifted to a different Amazon data center, based on what ISP the end user is using.
In the Amazon example, Amazon already provides its users with basic availability information about its cloud. Amazon recently reported a service outage in its Virginia data centers. Kagan noted that big outages are not what really concern him as he's looking at what the actual end-user experience is like from specific Internet service providers.
"If something is slow, I want to know if it's just me or if it's my peers as well," Kagan said. "That's valuable data, and it's what unique about our platform."

Cedexis also has a load balancing service called Openmix that will send traffic to the most available platform, based on policy and availability intelligence, Kagan said. One thing that Cedexis does not do today is provide visibility into why a given cloud service is running slow.

"Openmix provides real-time load balancing as a service, but it skips over that answer of why a cloud is running slow," Kagan said. "Users will be able to determine that they are getting—for example, a poor connection to Amazon Virginia and a better connection to Amazon in London— but we don't have a whole lot of insight into why that is occurring."
Kagan said that long term, Cedexis will address the issue of cloud availability slowdown specifics, but today the business use case is all around the fact that Openmix can enable a customer to take action in real time and the Radar service provides the visibility.
"So we don't know why, for example, if everyone is having problems connecting to a certain provider, but we can solve the problem by shifting the traffic around," Kagan said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.